500px aims to kill Flickr with new $20 Plus plan

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Flickr has been the de facto place where professional photographers show off their work for several years now, but Yahoo has failed to really capitalize on the Flickr brand as the company continues to falter. Now, it might be the beginning of the end for the once proud site. Rival photo haven 500px has introduced a new cheaper membership plan that undercuts Flickr and brings some unique features to the table.

Flickr’s Pro plan costs $25 per-year, which is a perfectly good value. 500px used to offer just a pricey $50 tier, but the new $20 Plus membership seems aimed directly at Flickr. A 500px Plus account will provide you with unlimited storage and access to your files, an unlimited number of collections, market functionality, and viewing statistics. This matches almost 1:1 with what Flickr is offering.

The statistics provided by 500px are somewhat more advanced than those you’d get with Flickr. The market functionality included with 500px Plus is a very robust service that helps users buy prints of their favorite pics, and Flickr can’t really match this even at the Pro level. These features have already coaxed some professionals into leaving Flickr, and the new lower price can only accelerate that.

500px also rolled out a Mac file upload tool to make getting content into the service that much easier for the roughly 25% of 500px users that have a Mac. The app sits at the top of the screen, ready to upload any pics you want at a moment’s notice. The web uploader, while reasonably good, is more tedious than this method. No word on a Windows version of the tool.

500px is currently seeing 30,000 photo uploads per day to the service, and a cheaper plan will likely increase the rate at which 500px leaches users from more established services.